The Fish Ladder (24 page)

It was evening when I got back to the hotel. I had walked thirty miles in the last two days. Then driven two hours back. Although I had felt almost fluid in Dunbeath, my summer body loose as willow, I ached as I walked from the car park to the lobby, my limbs stiffening in the evening chill. One toe throbbed. I suspected I would lose the nail. The young barman Callum entered the lobby, and without saying a word picked up my holdall and headed up the stairs. At the landing he turned towards the grand rooms at the front of the house and I paused, confused, for I was very much aware of our last interchange. My room had been at the top of the hotel. Realising that I was no longer following him, he also stopped, and turned to me:

‘They said you’d gone to follow a river to its source. We said
well, if that’s the case, then that lassie’s going to be wanting a hot bath
 . . .’

I suddenly felt like a warrior queen, from long ago, coming home triumphant from a battle. Callum opened the door to what was probably the best room in the house, and put down my bag; he then nodded towards an open door. There had been no bathroom in the old room, just the communal bath beneath the eaves; but I could already see the lip of a roll-top bath and a pile of fluffy white towels.

‘Would you like me to set your table in the bar?’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That would be grand.’

Notes on
Dunbeath

*
As it happened, Saints Servanus and Kentigern lived a hundred years apart, and would never have had the opportunity to meet.

Madryn

Two days later, Evie and I returned to our home on the
Llŷn
. The Welsh and English schools had, for the most part, begun the autumn term, although there were still a couple of weeks before the Spanish schools went back. We decided to pick up the last part of Afon Geirch, the river that ended at Cable Bay, but which we had failed to follow beyond the golf course at the start of the holiday. We left the cottage on foot, and then set off up a bridle path that spiralled around Garn Fadryn. It took us across the lower reaches of the mountain until we climbed over a stone wall beneath the summit cone. The river, which was now a shallow stream, passed beneath the wall in a specially built granite conduit. A bridge of railway sleepers carried sheep and walkers across the waterway. Watercress and sorrel filled the streambed. Evie called the sleepers Picnic Bridge, and we stopped to eat the eponymous picnic that we had, of course, brought with us. Our legs dangled above the water, which gurgled with a domestic, familiar sound, like bath water passing down a drain.

‘Do you know something?’ said Evie. ‘This is my favourite place in the world.’ And we sat there, smiling, eating our sandwiches.

A drone of farm machinery floated up from the plain, then stopped. Beyond the plain was the sea, and it was the same soft blue as the sky, the transition marked by a whitish haze. For a brief moment there was silence, broken only by the occasional
mah
of sheep, until a staccato song of squabbling chaffinches drifted on a sudden breeze: two leaning trees were alive with their chatter, I could just make out their little forms. We put away our picnic and followed the stream up the hill. Evie was adept at picking through thistles and reeds and sphagnum moss, and she soon unearthed the source. Rushes like stiff ribbons festooned the ground, and a bent tree partially obscured the spring. A white boulder marked the place where the water began, two other stones were arranged to either side. It felt unlikely that this rock formation was natural. Evie began to clear the area around the biggest stone, heaping handfuls of moss and leaves, beech nuts and pine needles to one side, until she revealed the well, its water cloudy as she churned the bottom, searching out further debris. She looked up at me while she worked:

‘We need to bring gardening things and tidy it up properly,’ she said. ‘What shall we call it?’

I told her about St Madron’s Well in Cornwall. It was a rag well, and people left bits of cloth – often ribbons cut for the purpose, but sometimes the torn hem of a shirt or a hastily removed sock – in the hope that their wishes would be granted, their prayers answered. Our mountain was called Garn Fadryn, known locally as Madryn, after the Welsh mother goddess Modron, and we decided, for the sake of harmony, on St Madryn’s Well in English, and Ffynnon Madryn in Welsh. Evie asked me for a piece of paper, and a pen, and I gave her a page of my notebook. She then sat down and wrote for a few moments before spearing the torn-out page onto a branch of the bent tree, as though it were a bill awaiting payment.

I wondered what she had written, and watched for a few moments the square of paper. It shivered like a Buddhist prayer flag at a shrine. She saw me looking, and shot me a glance, and her soft grey eyes conveyed a warning. I stepped back. Evie’s business was between her and the well, which was already beginning to clarify.

When we got back to the cottage it was evening. After supper and a bath, Evie went to bed. There was a missed call on my mobile, so I went and sat on the swing in the garden to retrieve the message. It was Rupert. He had heard about a hotel along the Costa Brava, it occupied a curving bay, close by the Catalan/French border. It had been built to house some archaeologists during the 1930s when they had unearthed a Graeco-Roman city. He thought that if Evie and I were to come back early, and he were to take a few days off work, then perhaps we could go there, the three of us, and spend some time together before school began.

The last time the three of us had been together in a hotel was when we were married, Evie and I unwinding curlers from our hair in the dawn light, her face absolutely serious as she arranged the snowy folds of my dress, and used her licked finger to clean a line of fine dust from the toe of my white cowboy boot. I recalled the furrow of intent between her eyebrows as she wound uneven pearls around my neck and I fastened Navajo silver beads – her gift from Rupert – round hers. Then she ran out in her raw silk skirts and scarlet ballet pumps to Rupert – with our gift to him of an antique turquoise bolo in her hand – calling:
You mustn’t look at Mummy till we get there
. The soles of her feet had been barely insulated against the blistering asphalt footpath. Her excitement at the stretch limousine. Her puzzlement at the empty church. Her delight at our wedding breakfast of sushi. Later, the three of us – lazy as lions – had lain beside the pool, while champagne warmed to the temperature of blood and a golden box of handmade chocolates ran to liquid.

It was the hottest day on record in Las Vegas.

Stars appeared around the summit of Garn Fadryn. A triangle of darkness marked the peak. I dialled the number, waited for the connection, and then listened for the steady pulse of the ring.

PART II

Is it possible to pierce . . . the dark cloud, even for a few moments, and come on the light, the bubbling well at the end of the fairy tale? Do folk still do it, ordinary people?

Neil M. Gunn

All that I have is a river.

Johnny Flynn

Notes on
Epigraph to Part II

Swimming Pool (2)

I was with my friend Eleonora at a café in Barcelona. We were about to collect the children from school.

‘There is a big wave coming,’ I said, ‘and we have to leave before it gets here.’

‘A wave? What sort of wave?’ she asked.

‘A tsunami.’

We collected the children and began our walk to the bus stop. Evie and Matteo, Eleonora’s son, climbed onto the fence that surrounded Sofia’s garden. Or the garden that had been Sofia’s before the summer. Sunlight had split the fence, and I could see through the cracks to the empty pool. The bougainvillea was struggling without water. Dried stalks spilled out of ceramic pots like leftover take-away noodles. The grass was covered in pine cones. Neither of us had heard from Sofia since she’d left Barcelona, though I’d emailed a couple of times.

‘It’s to do with the banks,’ I said, returning to where we’d left off. ‘We have to leave while we still can.’

‘But you’ve already left your pretty house!’ Her face looked so lovely with her raised eyebrows that I found I was smiling. We had shifted from our eighteenth-century terracotta-roofed house, built around a tiled courtyard, into a tiny flat in a 1970s apartment block, and we lived surrounded by packing boxes.

‘It’s not enough. I need to go back to London. I need to get a proper job.’ A bus came round the corner, and I stuck out my arm, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Rupert’s livelihood had been shattered by the first hard shock. His American publishers, for the first time in his career, had turned down a book. When the news came we had lain awake all night, holding hands, staring at the ceiling. At about four in the morning Evie appeared in her pyjamas on the terrace that linked our two bedrooms. She tapped on the glass door: ‘I can’t sleep.’ The sky above her head was dense with stars.

Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer?

The lines were from a John Cheever story. It was funny what came to mind. I could clearly see Orion’s belt. ‘Neither can we,’ I said, as I opened the glass door for her, and we all three went downstairs and sat around the kitchen table, staring at a pot of tea, and making shrapnel-like toast from the remains of yesterday’s baguette.

Rupert had been a writer for almost thirty years. In the UK, the book would win a literary prize. But the prize was a piece of engraved glass. We could no longer afford to pay Evie’s school fees, or the mortgage on our home. Every so often I recalled the presentiment I had had as I turned away from the loch at the foot of Morven. The idea that something precious was passing. Had passed. I recalled the headless rabbit on the footpath above Dunbeath. Its rubbery entrails. Presaging what? When Christmas came the three of us went to stay with Mum. Evie and I stayed longer than Rupert who needed to return to his work. In the days following his depart­­­ure it began to snow. When it was our turn to fly home a taxi took us to the airport in a dawn the colour of unwashed sheets. A man in a luminous yellow jacket waved us away. The airport was closed. The driver turned the slipping car across the hard ridges that marked the edges of other tyre-tracks. I watched his eyes in the rear-view mirror and I felt a fluttering unease.

‘I’ve never driven in anything like this before,’ he said, trying to make light of it. He was too young to remember the last serious snowfall.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Try not to use the brakes.’ His eyes flared in the mirror. Wet flakes clogged up the windshield. He changed down through the gears and we fish-tailed slowly back to Mum’s house.

Later that day Evie went sledging with her friend Alice in a sloping field behind their house. I went too, and watched the girls as they shrieked and giggled, bouncing on Alice’s scarlet toboggan over snow-filled rabbit holes. Children and grown-ups stood about, laughing, clapping snow from woolly fingers and sharing coffee from a flask. My friend Lucy, who was Alice’s mum, offered me a tea tray and I too juddered over the beleaguered rabbit warren and came to rest by a frozen stream at the far edge of the field. But I felt cold, tired and stiff, and I couldn’t enter into the spirit of this unexpected extension to our holiday. It wasn’t like the surface patina of winter, but an internal ache, that felt colder than the space between the stars. It was as though a plug had been pulled out of my breastbone, just to the right of centre, and my vitality, my life, was passing through it.

In the weeks that followed we began to fold away our Barcelona life. We looked for a new home in London, one we could afford, and a new school, a state school, for Evie. With the help of my brother John, and Evie’s godfather Calvin, who paid her school fees, we would be able to stay in Spain until the start of the summer holiday. When the summer term ended we would move to London.

One morning, in late spring, I found myself staring into the bathroom mirror. Despite the sunlight bouncing off the tiles my face looked lined and puffy. A thought presented itself, singular and loud.
Y
o
u look as though you are dying
. On a Sunday morning at the end of May I noticed a sensation of tightness near my sternum. I massaged the skin. There wasn’t anything specific. I worked my fingers into the space between my ribs. There was something, a sort of stiffness, as though chewing gum had been stuck alongside my breastbone. I thought it must be a knot in the muscle. But a week later it still hadn’t gone. I made an appointment to see a doctor. She said she thought that it was probably a cyst, but advised me to have a mammogram. She felt fairly certain there was nothing urgent. Sometime in the next three months would be fine. I resolved to see a doctor when we arrived in London.